


Puppet Strings

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 5x01 Tag, 5x02 Tag, Coda, F/M, Gen, season 5 speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 09:17:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12908919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: "46 days after they’re taken, after she’s taken, he wonders if it’s impossible. If the thread of time has already been written and if he’s simply an unwilling participant in its script of history. That he’s doomed to watch it play out, a puppet in the theatre."A possible Fitz perspective from the end of season 4/beginning of season 5.





	Puppet Strings

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry if this is shit i wrote it in half an hour  
> Also I haven't posted in months! I'd say sorry but ive been working on my novel so im not that sorry.  
> hope you enjoy lol

Fitz blinks and finds himself unalone in the diner. 

Everything remains as it was a moment ago. 

The waitress, an older but not old woman who looks more than a little exhausted on this late night shift is mid pour, refilling the coffee mug of a man sitting in the far corner. He’s got the same pinched expression and scrawled over legal pad of paper, pen marks scratch vigorously as he smiles at the waitress in thanks. 

A woman with a ponytail and a too young baby sits in a booth reading a book with that typical, eternal, new mother panicked look. 

The cook hums some unrecognizable tune, unbroken, from the back which Fitz can only barely hear over the music playing from the very stereotypical but actually still functional jukebox by the till. 

It’s all exactly the same. 

But Jemma is no longer at his side. 

He stumbles off his stool, turns too quickly in a circle, and makes his own vision blur.

The plates are still on the counter. 

“Hey!” he calls at the waitress, too harshly in his own ears but he can’t feel his heart in his chest any longer and the sensation has slipped from his fingertips. 

She looks up with the resigned sigh of overworked customer service employees, like she’s already anticipating the most absurd thing he could be complaining about, and wondering how she’s going to stop him from throwing a fit.

“Yes?” Her tone is anything but sweet though impossible to construe as impolite. 

“Have you seen my friends?”

He’s not entirely sure he’s still got the right to that title, their _friend_ , after all that’s happened, all that he’s done, but there isn’t any time for the contemplation of their relationship standings, or the near-synonyms of the English language. 

She shrugs. “They were there a minute ago.” And turns back to her coffee pot, going about refilling the room. 

Fitz spins in another circle. His heart returns to him, pounding against his sternum, trying to claw out of his chest. 

All but a half second has passed. 

They’re not there. 

 

A month later he’s nowhere closer but he’s transformed the second bedroom of his and Jemma’s apartment into an office. 

On the one wall, the only one without a window to spill in _natural light Fitz,_ he’s set up as rough an estimation of a timeline as he can manage. 

It took him a week to comb the earth for them. 

Another two before he realized that it wasn’t space they were dealing with. It was _time._

That had prompted six hours, sitting on the floor, staring at the previously blank wall in a room where they had yet to set up any kind of furniture because they couldn’t decide what was to be done with the space and things were chaos so it was easier to just stay at the base. 

He could hardly find the will to return to the flat without her. But necessity, in the end, had won out. He had nowhere else. Nothing else. 

Dust still settles over the master, undisturbed. He’s been sleeping with his work, in an old sleeping bag, transferred from storage facility to storage facility, with them since the Academy, on the floor. 

Once he returned to his self, his willpower resolved, the problem at hand accepted, he wrote the post card. Even though he had no idea where to put it to ensure she saw it. The need to find her, the need to prove to her that he could still fix them, was overwhelming. 

He wrote it anyways. 

His pen almost shaking on the Z of his name. 

There’s no other choice, he’s working on it. 

 

46 days after they’re taken, after _she’s_ taken, he wonders if it’s impossible. If the thread of time has already been written and if he’s simply an unwilling participant in its script of history. That he’s doomed to watch it play out, a puppet in the theatre. 

Because if he’s there, working out how they were taken and how to get them back, then they must be elsewhere, and if they’re elsewhere, influencing events, making changes, that sets the future they must be experiencing in stone. Because they exist in it, it remains unchangeable, they experience their own destiny so they can no longer warp it. And Fitz, caught behind, can only play into the hand of that pre-established time. It’s all caught up in the invisible dimension, intertwined with the things he can only touch, not influence. 

He wonders if they really _are_ cursed. If there’s some force that sees and knows and tears them apart even when she’s already miles away because of what he’s done. What it’s made him do. Or the man he is. 

Part of him wants to laugh. To scream to the sky, to the gods, to the unshakable truths of the universe, _She is everything, of course I can never earn to love her._

 

When he finds the Monolith, when he beats the truth out of the hired beings who took them, he doesn’t dare go through. 

There are too many variables at work, even if he knows the place, the time, the _date_ of where they are, even if he’d die to see Jemma again, however unworthy of that pleasure he is. It’s far too dangerous. He was left behind for a reason. 

The breakthrough doesn’t help as much as it should. He sits that night, his back to the wall of the room which should have been a study, a guestroom for her parents, a nursery with the walls painted pale yellow like the sun of Earth and a cot in the corner he would spend hours agonizing over building, PhD’s be damned. 

He eats a can of SpagettiOs with the metal lid only half pealed back, daring it to cut him, in the semi-darkness of the living room lamp Jemma bought because the glass shade cast asymmetrical shadows across the walls heaped beneath the weight of his many ineptitudes. 

He doesn’t recognize himself in the mirror. 

Nor will she.


End file.
